Fake News and Buggy Whip Makers

Fake news! Wow!

This is very serious. Don't laugh. The progs are atwitter, gasping, and clutching their pearls over the scourge of "fake news"!

Go ahead, type in the words "fake news" in your search bar and you will get a flood of stories about "fake news," its pernicious influence on the 2016 elections, on your brain's ability to function, and, of course, lots of advice on how to avoid "fake news" which basically comes down to read only the establishment media.

Somewhere, George Orwell is laughing.

Let's start with the obvious.

"Fake news" has been round since history began. "Fake news," you know, what your grandmother used to call lies . . . not a recent invention. And, I am not just referring to governmental or other avowedly political propaganda--we are not just talking about Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Jung-Un. Much of history, of course, is routinely denounced as "fake," or one-sided, or "the victor's account." We have a whole university-intellectual-media complex devoted to deconstructing historical accounts and rewriting them. So this is nothing new. Every generation rewrites the past. The heroes of yesterday are the villains of today, and vice-versa. Nothing new.

While this is nothing new, the progressives and their media acolytes have got what they think is a way of explaining progressivism's string of defeats in recent months, including, of course, the election of Donald Trump. So the progs do what they always do: lie, insult, berate, and, above all, try to silence the voices of dissent, all in the name of truth. If you disagree with the progressives you are a racist, a misogynist, an Islamophobic nutcase, and, now, you are a promoter of "fake news."

I have written before about how progressives try to redefine words and make them tools of progressivism. I have also written before about how progressive "journalists"feel compelled to lie and distort in their pursuit of "truth." The clamor about "fake news" is another manifestation of the totalitarian impulse in progressive thought and action, and, of course, another manifestation of the willful blindness they practice when confronted by an otherwise inexplicable narrative. As we see, "fake news" is defined as that which does not comply with the progressive narrative; "fake news" is a depiction of events that does not support the prefabricated progressive vision of the world.

Look at what the mainstream media terms as the purveyors of "fake news" and you will almost inevitably see a list of conservative commentators. I would be honored to be on that list.

As I wrote before when discussing the progressive fabulist Brian Williams,

he is a hero and a product of the Hollywood-University-Media complex which has done so much irreparable damage to our nation and Western civilization. 

Williams joins the ranks of other progressive "journalists" such as, 

Dan Rather, who tried to throw an American election by pushing a patently false story about George W. Bush; 

Janet Cook, who concocted a much-awarded narrative of an eight-year-old heroin addict; 

Jayson Blair, who fabricated a number of much-commented on stories for the New York Times; 

Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone who spread the UVA fake rape story; 

and, of course, who could forget, The Lord of Them All, Commissar in Chief Walter Duranty, New York Times apologist extraordinaire for Joseph Stalin and his mass murders in Ukraine. 

Now, of course, we have many more recent additions to that list. Should we not name as "fake news" the lachrymose Ferguson tale of "Hands up! Don't shoot!" How about the lurid accounts of the Zimmerman shooting? How about the Baltimore killer cops? How about . . . well, you get it.

The progressive overlords of the dying traditional media outlets strike me as akin to the owners of the last buggy whip factory railing against the flood of Model T's pouring from the assembly lines of Henry Ford. As happened with buggy whips, which became nothing more than an ornament on some car owner's wall, so it is with the old progressive media destined to serve as liner for the bottom of our bird cages.

Oh, and by the way, just to end on an even happier note, I bought a 1911 Colt Commander today. It, apparently, will be among the very last Colt 1911s sent by Colt to California. Beautiful gun; got to wait ten days, however, and must pick it up before the new year. The gun store, I would note, was a hive of optimism as customers and employees commented on the victory of Donald Trump.